The Hercules Club
by Boosette
Summary: Macey Irving spends New Year's Eve 2013 with her dad, and gets on the phone tree. (Sortof.)


Originally posted at archive of our own at /works/1121340.

* * *

Macey sat curled up on her dad's couch, underneath a fuzzy blanket with a cup of hot chocolate. The coffee table was pushed a couple of feet to one side, making room for her chair. Pizza and buffalo wings and a two liter bottle of Pepsi were spread out, decimated, on the table itself. Across the room, her dad held the blinds apart, staring out into ... something.

Three weeks ago she would've guessed "the weather". Now she wasn't so sure; he didn't used to _brood_. Three weeks ago she'd been getting used to the idea that her dad wasn't going to be around a lot — three weeks ago her mom had sat down on her bed and talked at her for half an hour, saying a lot of nothing in a lot of words that boiled down to: they're giving him one more chance.

"I'm not missing Christmas in the city," she'd said, and won that point, setting the tablet she'd been using as a shield down in her lap.

_You deserve to have a relationship with your father. Idiot doesn't know what he's missing._

Now he drummed his fingers against the window frame, and let the blinds fall back into place, where they swung wildly back and forth. It was too warm inside, with or without the snow.

"Still snowing," her dad said, sitting down.

On the one hand: she'd have a snow day for sure, day after tomorrow.

On the other hand: she'd probably still be in Sleepy Hollow, and she didn't know how much of each other she and her dad could _stand_.

He was fidgeting with a pillow now.

At last, Macey said, "That is unsurprising, considering it was doing that five minutes ago." She used the monotone delivery she'd been working on, testing out with her friends at school. She grinned, scrunching her nose up the same way she would when she was a kid, to take some of the sting out of the snark.

For a minute it looks like he might call her on her tone, but then he just shook his head. The hem of the pillow came undone beneath her dad's fingertips and he cursed, putting it away after the damage was done.

"It's a _pillow_," she said. She freed its twin from behind her shoulders and waved it above her head. "Not the end of the world."

Frank Irving grimaced for about half a second, then caught her challenge and tossed the pillow in her direction; Macey blocked with her own pillow. The thrown cushion bounced off and hit her dad in the chest, ending up on the floor with a fluffy piece of filling sticking out from where he'd killed the stitching.

He laughed, and then fell silent. After a while, he said, "God, I miss you. Every damn day."

She jumped on the moment.

"Dad, there's something going on that you're not telling me about. Talk to me."

For a minute he looked like he might lie for her benefit, which Macey _hated_, and which she could see coming ten miles away. She'd learned through months of both her parents promising everything would be okay, and then nothing being okay.

He didn't, though. He closed the empty pizza box and screwed the cap back on the soda. Then he started stacking the paper plates on top of each other.

"_Dad._"

"I _wish_ I could tell you what's going on right now. I wish I could. But right now, I need you to trust me that it's _nothing _I can't handle."

She could say two things. Option one: that the stuff she was coming up with on her own was a lot worse than anything the world could throw at them.

She went with Option Two, because she hated lying by omission almost as much as she hated lying to her face. "Right, you freaked out in the park over something you had _completely under control_."

Her dad went tense: even though he leaned back into the creased leather couch, his knuckles were ashy from how tightly-balled he held his fists. The muscles in his neck stood out, and Macey _saw _him swallow. Then he made the face he usually reserved for when he was about to say something he regretted later — this time he reined himself in and spent a whole lot of time saying a whole lot of nothing.

The blinds stopped clicking against each other. She almost wished they'd start up again.

"Whatever it is," she said, diving back for a save with Option One, "I'm coming up with something about three thousand times worse inside my own head."

"I guarantee you're not. Just ... trust me on that one. "

"Are you dying?"

"Am I —? What? No, I am not _dying_. What the _hell _gave you that idea?"

"You _freaked out _in the middle of the park! You could have a tumor! I don't _know_!"

"I don't, and I'm not — That much I _can _tell you."

"Are you and Mom getting back together?"

He winced. Maybe she shouldn't have gone there, but ...

"No, but I should call her now, let her know we'll probably be late getting in. If the snow stops long enough for us to drive out at all."

She knew an I-am-ending-this-discussion-young-lady when she saw one. She pulled out her phone and hit "Mom" in her contacts, looking anywhere except at her dad's face.

"Done," Macey said, hitting _send _on her text. (_lots of snow here, might b back late. u?_)

"I can't tell whether that was you setting me up to owe you a favor or not. No, don't answer that. Any luck finding something to watch? "

Ten o'clock and if she'd learned one thing on this visit, it was that after Christmas, the abundance of sappy Christmas movies on tv, was replaced by a void of terrible shows. At home she would've raided the DVD shelf, but she hadn't really thought that far ahead when he'd asked her to visit over New Year's Eve.

The half-a-dozen news channels counted down to 2014 in a ribbon across the bottom of the TV screen, while the anchors went on and on and _on _about the winter storm. It was like they'd never seen snow before.

ABC Family had run out of marathon, and all three _Matrix _movies with the swearing cut out was playing on TNT. Hilarious: yes. Something she wanted to spend the next nine hours with commercials watching? Not really. She was pretty sure her dad didn't _want _to know she watched _Game of Thrones _when it showed up on On Demand.

Macey shrugged. Her chocolate had stopped steaming and gone cold half-drunk.

"Every channel might as well be a dead channel."

"This is your night," her dad said. "You wanna stay up until sunrise; we'll do it. You're queen of the remote control, and I'm your willing captive audience."

"I have an idea, though."

Because if he'd decided he was going to go out of his way to not ruin tonight, then she wasn't about to do anything stupid, either.

"Your mother gets that look," he said.

Which was how they wound up watching _Sharknado _on Neflix — the good parts version, because it was _not _a good movie. When the lead got swallowed whole by a flying shark, the elder Irving gestured wildly at the tv.

"Pause a minute?"

"You _said_," Macey said, but she paused anyway.

The shark was captured in mid-spin, careening toward the screen.

"There's no way he's makin' it out of that one alive."

"He saved a busload of children from flying sharks on a SyFy original movie. Do you_ really _believe he's dead meat?"

"Eaten. By. A. Shark."

"Pfft."

Macey unpaused, and sure enough, whatshisface lived to see daylight again. It was not exactly inspiring stuff, although the look on her dad's face came close. He sighed and folded his arms across his chest at the other end of the couch. Every time someone got eaten by a shark he'd twitched, and _that _gave her another idea.

She found the search menu and punched in _shark_. It took a minute to load up the results — probably because they weren't the only people spending the holiday inside watching dumb movies.

The selector hovered over _Two-Headed Shark Attack_.

Her bottom lip had found its way between her teeth, the only thing between Macey and an attack of giggles.

"Show your poor old dad a _little _mercy, Mace — "

"Air Jaws."

He actually _facepalmed _in _real life._ Then he said, "I'll be right back," and retreated in the direction of the kitchen.

Macey held her mug up for a refill, and counted down from ten. At seven the microwave beeped on; at two the hiss of an opening beer bottle. She hit play just as her dad arrived back in the living room, handing over her second mug of chocolate and propping his feet up on the table.

"You didn't have to wait up on me."

"Yes, I did. You're half the reason this is any fun at all."

"And what's the other half?"

At that very moment, an eighteen-foot-long great white shark jumped completely out of the water with a — well, it was either a rubber seal or a real one — in its mouth. Macey pointed at the tv. The people on the boat were jumping up and down, yelling their oohs and aahs.

"That," she said. "Mom doesn't like watching the seals get eaten."

"What you're saying is," her dad hedged, "that right now, I'm the cool parent."

"It's a one-night-only special offer," Macey replied blithely, as one of the guys on the boat slipped beneath the water and into the shark cage. A shark collided nose-first with the head-height opening in the cage.

They got halfway through the episode before her dad had her pause again. A shark researcher was holding up a bitten-in-half seal decoy, frozen with a look of concentrated glee.

"My night, my choices, no complaining," Macey said.

Her dad looked up, as if he was saying a short prayer.

He said, "Would you believe that the SHPD is the only thing that stands between us and the end of the world? That I got myself involved in covering up a demon-hunting racket, and the Sleepy Hollow Axe Killer is a horseman of the apocalypse?"

Macey had never seen her dad say anything with a straighter face before. He let out a breath, and then stood up to go check the snow again.

Neither of them spoke for a while; she unpaused and the shark-narrator was unrepentantly loud in the background.

She said, "Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?"

"Yeah. As a matter of fact, I know exactly how ridiculous it sounds."

She almost believed him. Suddenly she wanted to watch or do anything other than what was on right now.

"So you've got an X-box — what games do you have for it?"

Almost.


End file.
